The work-for-hire doctrine actually supports your intuition more than the AI authorship question does. The reason Anthropic likely owns Claude Code has little to do with whether Claude wrote it and everything to do with the employment contracts of the engineers who directed it. The DMCA takedown question is genuinely interesting though because DMCA requires the claimant to assert copyright ownership in good faith. If a court later found the codebase was predominantly AI-authored and therefore not copyrightable, the 8,000 takedowns could be challenged as bad faith DMCA claims. That is a different and more tractable legal question than the ownership one.

Work-for-hire doctrine doesnt automagically absolve you from IP law. Microsoft and Intel already learned this in the nineties when they paid San Francisco Canyon Company to steal Apple code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company

LLMs are just code stealers, will gladly generate Carmacks inverse for you with original comments.